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Continued from page 4

Knowledge@Wharton: More broadly, what does the future of broadband look like in the U.S.?

Werbach: Again, the fact that there is not more competition is a drag on broadband in the U.S. The U.S. is the world center for Internet innovation, Internet economic value creation and Internet freedom. But that’s been weakened in recent years, partly because of some of the revelations about government surveillance, which have caused companies and governments to no longer trust the U.S. on that front, and partly because we don’t have the level of broadband connectivity by some measures that they do in other places.

That will be a drag. We’ve talked to companies like Comcast and Verizon and so forth. They say, “Look, we are investing, we are providing these high speed services, we are putting fiber networks into the ground” — which by some measures we have more widely than other countries.

But I think if you look at the potential, we haven’t gone far enough. So, I’m worried … even though Silicon Valley is here, and even though Wall Street, which funds so much of this, is here, and even though we have this extraordinary innovation culture. The smartest and best entrepreneurs and technologists want to come here from around the world — that’s not going away. But I think there is some risk, if we don’t have a true national policy of promoting advances in broadband and more competition at every turn, that the U.S. falls behind, and also that we lose some of this potential that the Internet has and that broadband has for catalyzing both economic benefit as well as all these great social benefits.